Mashable

LONDON — Tim Peake makes history on Tuesday by becoming first British astronaut to go to the International Space Station.

He was selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the mission with NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko on a Soyuz spacecraft from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Peake will be there for six months, conducting a series of experiments and updating us all on his progress, which he hopes will inspire people, particularly children, to take an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

8,000

ESA astronaut programme applicants

3

The number of seats in the Soyuz

265

Amount of experiments Peake will do

24

Years since a Brit last went into space

Who is Tim Peake

43-year-old Peake from Chichester in the southeast of England has had a long and illustrious career. He graduated from the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1992 as an officer in the British Army Air Corps. He served as a platoon commander in Northern Ireland before beginning flight training and getting his Army Flying Wings in 1994.

In the 90s he flew reconnaissance flights over the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Kenya and Canada before becoming a helicopter pilot and instructor at the end of the decade, taking part in numerous test flights in military helicopters during the noughties. He’s flown over 30 types of helicopter and fixed wing aircraft during his career.

After retiring from the British Army in 2009, he was selected by the ESA as an astronaut, completing basic training in November 2010. In 2011 he lived underground for a week in a Sardinian cave system as part of further training, studying human behaviour in extreme environments, and a year later he spent 12 days underwater off the coast of Florida for NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) and completed training and certification for spacewalks.

Waterwalks

Neemo aquanauts descend 20 metres under the sea in Florida.

ESA/H. Stevenin

Living underground

Exploring Sardinian caves in Italy.

ESA / V. Crobu

The married, father-of-two was picked from more than 8,000 people to head to the ISS after passing through a rigorous selection process, Libby Jackson, Astronaut Flight Education Programme Manager for the UK Space Agency (UKSA), told Mashable.

“Astronauts are cool under pressure, they’re able to function in a team, to follow instructions well but also think for themselves. They need to be able to respond to emergencies without help from mission control because they might not have communications. And they’ve got to be able to live in a confined space with people for a long period of time.”

“Tim is a fantastic astronaut,” she insists. “He is very friendly, very calm, very cool, he thinks things through logically but does that with a smile on his face.”

How to follow Tim

Peake is a dedicated tweeter, keeping his 80,000 followers at @astro_timpeake up to date with news of his mission. He also updates a blog on the ESA site several times a week and posts dispatches on his Facebook page.

Mission Poster

Expedition 46 poster, featuring Tim Peake.

NASA/Rex Features

Getting to the Space Station

The crew will travel to the Space Station in a Soyuz spacecraft called the TMA-19M. At one end, the spherical orbital module provides living space, storage, a toilet and the access hatch to the ISS once docked. The middle section is the descent module, a control panel-filled space for the crew during the journey to and from Earth. The bottom third is the service module.

Underneath all this, a 50 metre-high launcher consisting of three sections. The launcher delivers 26 million horsepower to reach an orbital speed of 28,800 km/h. Within ten seconds of rising from the pad, the three men inside will have travelled over 1,640 km. They’ll reach the space station in six hours. Helping them to travel at these dizzying speeds are 300 tonnes of propellent; a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen generate propulsion.

Soyuz FG Rocket

This will carry Tim Peake to the ISS on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015.

Gareth Fuller/PA Wire

The action takes place Thursday morning shortly after 11 a.m. GMT at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Peake is blasting off to three tunes: Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” U2’s “Beautiful Day,” and Coldplay’s “A Sky Full Of Stars.” He told journalists that he’s most looking forward to the view of Earth and performing spacewalks during his trip.

The way home

The Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft in March, 2015.

NASA, Bill Ingalls

The return to Earth six months later is even quicker, and Peake and his fellow travellers are expected back within four hours. The Soyuz separates into three parts, with the orbital and service modules burning up on reentry and the descent module positioning a heat shield towards the direction of reentry.

The craft’s cruising speed of 28,800 km/h is massively reduced and the crew experience a force of 4-5 g. Parachutes and retrorockets slow them down further before they land at a speed of around 5km/h, deploy a communication antenna and are picked up by rescue crews.

What he'll be doing up there

Getting space ready

Tim Peake tests his NASA spacesuit.

ESA/NASA

Peake will be conducting a variety of experiments in the fields of physiology, biology, materials science, solar physics and radiation physics. The astronauts will exploit the environment to employ a variety of factors, including weightlessness, extreme radiation, vacuum and isolation to study physical and psychological effects in a new way.

In total, Peake has some 265 experiments lined up, he has said. These include: Measuring brain pressure in space, which scientists think might affect astronauts’ vision; using a levitation device to discover more about the properties of metals; and placing organisms outside of the ISS to see how and if they’ll survive in space. The latter is part of a larger project to see if there could indeed be life on Mars.

You haven’t got plumbers and electricians that you can call out so they’ll have to do those things too.

“He’ll also be doing some maintenance because the crew have to keep the Space Station running,” Jackson told Mashable.

It won’t all be experiments. On Apr. 24, he’ll run the length of the London marathon at the same time as the runners back on Earth, using a space treadmill on the ISS.

The UK and space exploration

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Part of the UK as seen from the ISS.

ESA

The UK was a late starter when it came to space exploration. During the years that the Soviet Union and the U.S. were racing each other to the moon and beyond, the British authorities remained sceptical about the benefits of investing the significant resources needed. While there were plenty at home interested in the possibilities of space (and the likes of H.G. Wells inspired German Dr. Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 rocket was the antecedent of those used in Russian and American space travel), it wasn’t until the 21st century that serious consideration began.

“Up until 2012, Britain didn’t contribute to the human spaceflight programme, so this is why there haven’t been British astronauts, because it was not something that we did,” Jackson says. “Over time an economic case has been made as to why human space flight is good for the economy.”

In 2012, Britain put some money towards the ELIPS programme (or European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences in Space), she says, as well as the Orion Service Module, NASA’s next generation of crew vehicles.

Space fever

Tim Peake meets with David Cameron in Downing Street.

Dan Kitwood, Pool

“These contributions opened up access and allowed us to join the human space flight program.”

In 2014, the UKSA pledged £49 million ($74 million) to the ISS, which gives UK researchers access to the $100 billion (£66 billion) ISS programme.

However, the country has not been entirely absent from the game, launching a handful of satellites into space on American rockets and thrusting a single satellite, Prospero, into space on a British rocket in 1971. British scientific elements have also been included in foreign space projects, including the Beagle 2 probe which was discovered on Mars after 11 years earlier this year.

Mir Mission

Britain's Helen Sharman, left, walk towards the Soyuz TM-12.

AP Photo

Although Peake is often hailed as the first Brit in space, he was technically preceded by Sheffield-born Helen Sharman. The chemist went to the Soviet Union’s Mir space station as part of a privately funded programme in 1991. She took a book with her, Road to the Stars by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, which she has now given Peake to take to the ISS.

The UK space sector is worth £11.8 billion ($17.8 billion) to the economy, according to the UKSA, and employs some 37,000 people. The country is currently participating in over 20 active missions to explore the Solar System and has been involved in many high profile missions, including the Rosetta mission to land a robot on a comet. The UKSA aims to capture 10% of the global market for space by 2030.

With Tim Peake ISS-bound and tweeting all the way, a rapt audience back on Earth is ensuring British space exploration will continue for years to come.